Many studies show that gender predicts entries into self-employment – females are typically a minority of self-employed. Men also have a higher probability of remaining in business than women. In many countries, however, females represent the fastest growing segment among the self-employed. The reasons that lead women and men to enter self-employment can be very different, and may also differ between regions. A well-known but little understood fact is that rates of entrepreneurship exhibit pronounced and persistent variations across regions. The specification and understanding of regional entrepreneurial environments remains a complex issue. The aim of this paper is to throw some light on gender differences in entrepreneurship in Finland and its regions. Are there gender differences in self-employment rates, and if there are, for what reason? How do female entrepreneurs differ from male entrepreneurs with regard to predicted income, personal and household characteristics, assets, prior activity and industry? What is the husband’s role in the household? Personal characteristics such as family size, marital status, and the presence and ages of children may play different role for women than they do for men. We intend to apply the structural probit model to female self-employment in order to test the hypothesis whether an individual is more likely to be self-employed the greater is the predicted relative income in self-employment. Our data set is based on a Longitudinal Census File and the Longitudinal Employment Statistics File constructed by Statistics Finland. Since 1987, the two basic files are updated annually in Finland. These two register-based data sets, together with some other registers, provide panel data on each resident of Finland, from which a 7 per cent random sample is taken for this study. The data set is very rich including hundreds and hundreds of variables for 1987-2002.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by European Regional Science Association in its series ERSA conference papers with number
ersa06p380.
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Verheul, I. & Stel, A.J. van & Thurik, A.R., 2005.
"Explaining Female and Male Entrepreneurship at the Country Level,"
Research Paper
ERS-2005-089-ORG Revision, Erasmus Research Institute of Management (ERIM), ERIM is the joint research institute of the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University and the Erasmus School of Economics (ESE) at Erasmus Uni.
[Downloadable!]
Other versions: